14 April 2014. A World to Win News Service. A Spanish high court sentenced the 25-year-old rapper “Pablo Hasel” (Pablo Rivadulla Duro) to two years in prison for “glorifying terrorism” on 1 April. Several years ago, this “anti-system rapper,” as he calls himself, declared, “If they put me in prison, that will prove I’m right” – right that almost 40 years after the end of the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, despite economic, social and political changes, the Spanish state is still the enemy of the majority of Spanish people and the people of the world and “the critical spirit”.

Hasel was arrested in November 2011, during a time of upsurge in the country’s streets, when the police raided his home in the night and confiscated his digital devices, papers and books as evidence. At his trial before the high court for political cases, the judge ruled that the only question was whether or not Hasel was the author of the dozens of videos uploaded on YouTube and elsewhere on the Net. Since Hasel unhesitatingly stated that he was, the conviction was all but automatic. Hasel argued that he had the right to freedom of speech, but the judge ruled that while that freedom exists in Spain for some speech, Hasel’s rap constitutes “hate speech,” prohibited by law, and further, that “terrorism is the worst violation of human rights”, so no one has the right to defend it. (El Pais, 1 April 2014)

This is the standard legal double-talk that is the hallmark of the Spanish state: “terrorism” is an affront to “democracy”, so those accused of it have no rights, those who defend those accused of it have no rights, those who argue for those people’s rights are “apologists for terrorists” and so on in a widening spiral. But in sentencing an artist to prison for nothing but his words, this is a further step in demonstrating the truth of his words, that in capitalist countries “freedom of expression is nothing but freedom to lie or shut up, and like democracy, freedom of expression is one of history’s greatest swindles.”

What does it mean, Hasel says, to talk about freedom in a country where six million people have been robbed of their jobs, half a million people have been kicked out of their homes, “and if you protest you get beaten or killed?” One of his videos shows him in a June 2011 march of “Los Indignados” (the Outraged) in Valencia. The police attacked it viciously, as they did protests in other cities in Spain in those months. They sought not just to stop it but to break the heads, faces and arms of as many young women and men as possible, as the footage clearly and indisputably shows. Another rap video, “El reino de los torturadores” (The kingdom of torturers), features the battered and crushed faces and bodies of young women and men arrested at mass demonstrations defending Basque nationalist “terrorists” and then beaten and tortured while in custody – in the name of defending “democracy”.

How can Hasel be convicted of “hate speech” and being a threat to “democracy” when Franco-era torturers are considered respectable citizens, protected from arrest by law, even when clearly identified by their victims; Franco regime political figures are still prominent in public life; the main monument to fascism is untouched and untouchable; and it is perfectly legal and respectable to publicly praise Franco and seek to continue his work?

Franco came to power through a military uprising against an elected government in 1936 and an exterminating civil war, with the backing of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and the complicity of all the Western powers. His regime, which today could be called a Catholic jihad in its religious zeal and enforced cultural purity, targeted secular forces and workers and labourers, imprisoned all known opponents and executed many thousands. As was recently revealed, it stole thousands of babies from their mothers to ensure that they would have a proper conservative Catholic upbringing. Despite Franco’s alliance with the defeated Axis powers in World War 2, his regime survived by becoming a key American ally afterwards. Why today is it allowed to praise Franco but not groups that fought his regime? How can the upholders of the Spanish state accuse anyone else of “hate speech”? In fact, how can they label the political violence of their opponents as terrorism when they murdered people and broke lives on a vast scale for their political ends?

Perhaps Hasel’s greatest “crime” – and his greatest merit – is that since his 2005 breakthrough album “Eso No Es Paraiso” (This isn’t heaven) he raps about Spain as still a capitalist dictatorship. He says that brutal repression on the one hand, and elections and illusions about “freedom of expression”, the post-Franco regime’s supposedly greatest achievements on the other, are two sides of the same coin, and combine with a media-cultivated “dictatorship of stupidity” that encourages a “Stockholm syndrome” where the masses of people identify with the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses them. He is very clear that not only is the currently-governing Popular Party the political successor party to the fascist regime, but that the Socialist Party “is worse or at least as bad”, and that the parliamentary “left” is just a tail on the Socialists.

The Socialists (Hasel spells the party’s initials P$OE) made it possible for the Spanish ruling class to switch over from a fascist to a bourgeois democratic (electoral) form of rule almost painlessly, by protecting the continuity of persons and institutions and the bulk of the state apparatus, and agreeing to what some people call “the law of silence” protecting fascist personalities from legal consequences for their terrorist rule. The mass graves were kept secret and the killers given new jobs or allowed to keep up their work.

The Spanish Socialists led its own terrorist campaign against Basque nationalists when they came to govern. In the “dirty war”, Spanish death squads in France assassinated exiled Basque nationalists, ordinary Basques and French and other revolutionaries and bombed taverns and other public places. Neither ruling party has a right to call anyone else terrorists.

As a Socialist party MP shamelessly explained in commenting on a new case where the courts refused to hear the complaints of a former student activist against the official who tortured him in 1975, “I just don’t think it would be good for the country. We don’t know where it starts and where it finishes. If we take someone who was a torturer in 1970, why aren’t we going to go after some ministers in Franco’s government who are still alive? Why not the courts? Where do we set the limits?” (The New York Times, 8 April 2014). Yes – what if we went after the same courts once led by Franco that have now sentenced a young rapper to prison? Might that not imperil the repressive efficiency and legitimacy of the state itself?

No wonder the Spanish ruling class, despite its current democratic finery, zealously maintains the monarchy that smoothed the transition from open fascism to parliamentary democracy and still serves as the guarantor of the continuity of the Spanish state. Hasel’s hatred of the monarchy (one of his videos is called “Muerte a los borbones – Death to the Bourbons”, the royal family) takes its political meaning from this context, and is made all the more forbidden by the fact that he is not just attacking a cultural relic.

When Hasel raps about “democracy you mother-fucker” and talks about Spain’s and other “capitalist terrorists taking over the world”, rampaging through the Middle East and bringing misery everywhere, he connects with the truth. But when he raps about the alternative, which he sees as a society like Cuba or Venezuela, there is a disconnect with truth. As fierce as his critique of capitalism may be, it’s not thorough enough.

Despite their opposition to the U.S., these countries have not broken with the framework of the world imperialist system. The profit motive still rules the organization of the economy and society despite the existence of state enterprises and social welfare programmes. Their fate hangs on the imperialist world economy – and even simply the price of oil or sugar on the world market. They have not liberated their people from imperialist domination in the most profound sense of enabling them to take the road of overcoming all capitalist economic relations and institutions, all the enslaving social relations and the ideas, customs and habits born of exploitation.

Hasel does not even try to paint Cuba as a liberating society, but simply points out that Cuba puts Spain to shame when it comes to homelessness, illiteracy and other social ills. This is true, but has more in common with the revisionist (pseudo-Marxist) idea of socialism as a welfare state than a conception of a liberating revolution in social relations on the road to communism, where human beings are no longer enslaved by the division of society into classes.

This is linked to Hasel’s tendency to praise all armed struggles against what he calls imperialism, as though opposing the U.S. and one’s own ruling class were sufficient, without caring enough about the social and political content of those struggles, their ultimate goals. And when, as Hasel does, someone calls themselves a communist, and wears a USSR t-shirt, they need to be clear on the difference between the kind of non-liberating and dismal society that the Soviet Union became with the overthrow of socialism after Stalin’s death (even while socialist forms were retained for several decades, as in Cuba), and the revolutionary transformations of the previous period, which were taken much further in Mao’s China. These are not just old questions; they have everything to do with whether a total social revolution is possible, how, and what that would mean today. When Hasel calls for young people to wage “war for the future”, what is that future?

As strong as Hasel’s exposure of capitalist rule in Spain, it would be much stronger – and his stand even more powerfully attractive – if based on a more complete understanding of the basic problem and solution.

The timing of Hasel’s initial arrest, on the heels of system-defying protest by massive numbers of Spanish youth and others in those months of 2011, signals something about the fears of the Spanish ruling class. It is also important that hundreds of youth rallied in his defence in his home town of Lerida immediately after. More than a few youth are “looking beyond their own bellybuttons and their personal horizons,” as he says, and looking for radical answers.

(See the PabloHaselOfficial channel on YouTube, including the interview “Entrevista con rapero revolucionario”, and the transcribed version on kaosenlared.net, in Spanish only)

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Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.